Gibson, William - (2010) Bigend Trilogy - T3. Zero History (ENG).pdf

3 To Susan Allison, my editor 1. CABINET Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she’d first known this city. Pearlescent silver, this one. Glyphed in Prussian blue, advertising something German, banking services or business software; a smoother simulacrum of its black ancestors, its faux-leather upholstery a shade of orthopedic fawn. “Their money’s heavy,” he said, dropping a loose warm mass of pound coins into her hand. “Buys many whores.” The coins still retained the body heat of the fruit machine from which he’d deftly wrung them, almost in passing, on their way out of the King’s Something. “Whose money?” “My countrymen’s. Freely given.” “I don’t need this.” Trying to hand it back. “For the cab.” Giving the driver the address in Portman Square. “Oh Reg,” she said, “it wasn’t that bad. I had it in money markets, most of it.” “Bad as anything else. Call him.” “No.” “Call him,” he repeated, wrapped in Japanese herringbone Gore-Tex, multiply flapped and counterintuitively buckled. He closed the cab’s door. She watched him through the rear window as the cab pulled away. Stout and bearded, he turned now in Greek Street, a few minutes past midnight, to rejoin his stubborn protégé, Clammy of the Bollards. Back to the studio, to take up their lucrative creative struggle. She sat back, noticing nothing at all until they passed Selfridges, the driver taking a right. The club, only a few years old, was on the north side of Portman Square. Getting out, she paid and generously tipped the driver, anxious to be rid of Inchmale’s winnings. Cabinet, so called; of Curiosities, unspoken. Inchmale had become a member shortly after they, the three surviving members of the Curfew, had licensed the rights to “Hard to Be One” to a Chinese automobile manufacturer. Having already produced one Bollards album in Los Angeles, and with Clammy wanting to record the next in London, Inchmale had argued that joining Cabinet would ultimately prove cheaper than a hotel.

4 And it had, she supposed, but only if you were talking about a very expensive hotel. She was staying there now as a paying guest. Given the state of money markets, whatever those were, and the conversations she’d been having with her accountant in New York, she knew that she should be looking for more modestly priced accommodations. A peculiarly narrow place, however expensive, Cabinet occupied half the vertical mass of an eighteenth-century townhouse, one whose façade reminded her of the face of someone starting to fall asleep on the subway. It shared a richly but soberly paneled foyer with whatever occupied the other, westernmost, half of the building, and she’d formed a vague conviction that this must be a foundation of some kind, perhaps philanthropic in nature, or dedicated to the advancement of peace in the Middle East, however eventual. Something hushed, in any case, as it appeared to have no visitors at all. There was nothing, on façade or door, to indicate what that might be, no more than there was anything to indicate that Cabinet was Cabinet. She’d seen those famously identical, silver-pelted Icelandic twins in the lounge, the first time she’d gone there, both of them drinking red wine from pint glasses, something Inchmale dubbed an Irish affectation. They weren’t members, he’d made a point of noting. Cabinet’s members, in the performing arts, were somewhat less than stellar, and she assumed that that suited Inchmale just about as well as it suited her. It was the decor that had sold Inchmale, he said, and very likely it had been. Both he and it were arguably mad. Pushing open the door, through which one might have ridden a horse without having to duck to clear the lintel, she was greeted by Robert, a large and comfortingly chalk-striped young man whose primary task was to mind the entrance without particularly seeming to. “Good evening, Miss Henry.” “Good evening, Robert.” The decorators had kept it down, here, which was to say that they hadn’t really gone publicly, ragingly, batshit insane. There was a huge, ornately carved desk, with something vaguely pornographic going on amid mahogany vines and grape clusters, at which sat one or another of the club’s employees, young men for the most part, often wearing tortoiseshell spectacles of the sort she suspected of having been carved from actual turtles. Beyond the desk’s agreeably archaic mulch of paperwork twined a symmetrically opposed pair of marble stairways, leading to the floor above; that floor being bisected, as was everything above this foyer, into twin realms of presumed philanthropic mystery and Cabinet. From the Cabinet side, now, down the stairs with the widdershins twist, cascaded the sound of earnest communal drinking, laughter and loud conversation bouncing sharply off unevenly translucent stone, marbled in shades of aged honey, petroleum jelly, and nicotine. The damaged edges of individual steps had been repaired with tidy rectangular inserts of less inspired stuff, pallid and mundane, which she was careful never to step on.

5 A tortoise-framed young man, seated at the desk, passed her the room key without being asked. “Thank you.” “You’re welcome, Miss Henry.” Beyond the archway separating the stairways, the floor plan gave evidence of hesitation. Indicating, she guessed, some awkwardness inherent in the halving of the building’s original purpose. She pressed a worn but regularly polished brass button, to call down the oldest elevator she’d ever seen, even in London. The size of a small, shallow closet, wider than it was deep, it took its time, descending its elongated cage of black-enameled steel. To her right, in shadow, illuminated from within by an Edwardian museum fixture, stood a vitrine displaying taxidermy. Game birds, mostly; a pheasant, several quail, others she couldn’t put a name to, all mounted as though caught in motion, crossing a sward of faded billiard-felt. All somewhat the worse for wear, though no more than might be expected for their probable age. Behind them, anthropomorphically upright, forelimbs outstretched in the manner of a cartoon somnambulist, came a moth-eaten ferret. Its teeth, which struck her as unrealistically large, she suspected of being wooden, and painted. Certainly its lips were painted, if not actually rouged, lending it a sinisterly festive air, like someone you’d dread running into at a Christmas party. Inchmale, on first pointing it out to her, had suggested she adopt it as a totem, her spirit beast. He claimed that he already had, subsequently discovering he could magically herniate the disks of unsuspecting music executives at will, causing them to suffer excruciating pain and a profound sense of helplessness. The lift arrived. She’d been a guest here long enough to have mastered the intricacies of the articulated steel gate. Resisting an urge to nod to the ferret, she entered and ascended, slowly, to the third floor. Here the narrow hallways, walls painted a very dark green, twisted confusingly. The route to her room involved opening several of what she assumed were fire doors, as they were very thick, heavy, and self-closing. The short sections of corridor, between, were hung with small watercolors, landscapes, unpeopled, each one featuring a distant folly. The very same distant folly, she’d noticed, regardless of the scene or region depicted. She refused to give Inchmale the satisfaction he’d derive from her asking about these, so hadn’t. Something too thoroughly liminal about them. Best not addressed. Life sufficiently complicated as it was. The key, attached to a weighty brass ferrule sprouting thick soft tassels of braided maroon silk, turned smoothly in the lock’s brick-sized mass. Admitting her to Number Four, and the concentrated impact of Cabinet’s designers’ peculiarity, theatrically revealed when she prodded the mother-of-pearl dot set into an otherwise homely gutta-percha button. Too tall, somehow, though she imagined that to be the result of a larger room having been divided, however cunningly. The bathroom, she suspected, might actually be larger than the bedroom, if that weren’t some illusion. They’d run with that tallness, employing a white, custom-printed wallpaper,

6 decorated with ornate cartouches in glossy black. These were comprised, if you looked more closely, of enlarged bits of anatomical drawings of bugs. Scimitar mandibles, spiky elongated limbs, the delicate wings (she imagined) of mayflies. The two largest pieces of furniture in the room were the bed, its massive frame covered entirely in slabs of scrimshawed walrus ivory, with the enormous, staunchly ecclesiastic-looking lower jawbone of a right whale, fastened to the wall at its head, and a birdcage, so large she might have crouched in it herself, suspended from the ceiling. The cage was stacked with books, and fitted, inside, with minimalist Swiss halogen fixtures, each tiny bulb focused on one or another of Number Four’s resident artifacts. And not just prop books, Inchmale had proudly pointed out. Fiction or non-, they all seemed to be about England, and so far she’d read parts of Dame Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics and most of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male. She took off her coat, putting it on a stuffed, satin-covered hanger in the wardrobe, and sat on the edge of the bed to untie her shoes. The Piblokto Madness bed, Inchmale called it. “Intense hysteria,” she recited now, from memory, “depression, coprophagia, insensitivity to cold, echolalia.” She kicked her shoes in the direction of the wardrobe’s open door. “Hold the coprophagia,” she added. Cabin fever, this culture-bound, arctic condition. Possibly dietary in origin. Linked to vitamin A toxicity. Inchmale was full of this sort of information, never more so than when he was in the studio. Give Clammy a whole hod of vitamin A, she’d suggested, he looks like he could use it. Her gaze fell on three unopened brown cartons, stacked to the left of the wardrobe. These contained shrink-wrapped copies of the British edition of a book she’d written in hotel rooms, though none as peculiarly memorable as this one. She’d begun just after the Chinese car commercial money had come in. She’d gone to Staples, West Hollywood, and bought three flimsy Chinese-made folding tables, to lay the manuscript and its many illustrations out on, in her corner suite at the Marmont. That seemed a long time ago, and she didn’t know what she’d do with these copies. The cartons of her copies of the American edition, she now remembered, were still in the luggage room of the Tribeca Grand. “Echolalia,” she said, and stood, removing her sweater, which she folded and put in a chest-high drawer in the wardrobe, beside a small silk land mine of potpourri. If she didn’t touch it, she knew, she wouldn’t have to smell it. Putting on an off-white Cabinet robe, more velour than terry but somehow just missing whatever it was that made her so unfond of velour bathrobes. Men, particularly, looked fundamentally untrustworthy in them. The room phone began to ring. It was a collage, its massive nautical-looking handset of rubber-coated bronze resting in a leather-padded cradle atop a cubical box of brass-cornered rosewood. Its ring was mechanical, tiny, as though you were hearing an old-fashioned bicycle bell far off down a quiet street. She stared hard, willing it to silence. “Intense hysteria,” she said. It continued to ring.

7 Three steps and her hand was on it. It was as absurdly heavy as ever. “Coprophagia.” Briskly, as if announcing a busy department in a large hospital. “Hollis,” he said, “hello.” She looked down at the handset, heavy as an old hammer and nearly as battered. Its thick cord, luxuriously cased in woven burgundy silk, resting against her bare forearm. “Hollis?” “Hello, Hubertus.” She pictured herself driving the handset through brittle antique rosewood, crushing the aged electro-mechanical cricket within. Too late now. It had already fallen silent. “I saw Reg,” he said. “I know.” “I told him to ask you to call.” “I didn’t,” she said. “Good to hear your voice,” he said. “It’s late.” “A good night’s sleep, then,” heartily. “I’ll be by in the morning, for breakfast. We’re driving back tonight. Pamela and I.” “Where are you?” “Manchester.” She saw herself taking an early cab to Paddington, the street in front of Cabinet deserted. Catching the Heathrow Express. Flying somewhere. Another phone ringing, in another room. His voice. “Manchester?” “Norwegian black metal,” he said, flatly. She pictured Scandinavian folk jewelry, then self-corrected: the musical genre. “Reg said I might find it interesting.” Good for him, she thought, Inchmale’s subclinical sadism sometimes finding a deserving target. “I was planning on sleeping in,” she said, if only to be difficult. She knew now that it was going to be impossible to avoid him. “Eleven, then,” he said. “Looking forward to it.” “Good night. Hubertus.” “Good night.” He hung up. She put the handset down. Careful of the hidden cricket. Not its fault.

8 Nor hers. Nor even his, probably. Whatever he was. 2. EDGE CITY Milgrim considered the dog-headed angels in Gay Dolphin Gift Cove. Their heads, rendered slightly less than three-quarter scale, appeared to have been cast from the sort of plaster once used to produce worryingly detailed wall-decorations: pirates, Mexicans, turbaned Arabs. There would almost certainly be examples of those here as well, he thought, in the most thoroughgoing trove of roadside American souvenir kitsch he’d ever seen. Their bodies, apparently humanoid under white satin and sequins, were long, Modigliani-slender, perilously upright, paws crossed piously in the manner of medieval effigies. Their wings were the wings of Christmas ornaments, writ larger than would suit the average tree. They were intended, he decided, with half a dozen of assorted breed facing him now, from behind glass, to sentimentally honor deceased pets. Hands in trouser pockets, he quickly swung his gaze to a broader but generally no less peculiar visual complexity, noting as he did a great many items featuring Confederate-flag motifs. Mugs, magnets, ashtrays, statuettes. He considered a knee-high jockey boy, proffering a small round tray rather than the traditional ring. Its head and hands were a startling Martian green (so as not to give the traditional offense, he assumed). There were also energetically artificial orchids, coconuts carved to suggest the features of some generically indigenous race, and prepackaged collections of rocks and minerals. It was like being on the bottom of a Coney Island grab-it game, one in which the eclectically ungrabbed had been accumulating for decades. He looked up, imagining a giant, three-pronged claw, agent of stark removal, but there was only a large and heavily varnished shark, suspended overhead like the fuselage of a small plane. How old did a place like this have to be, in America, to have “gay” in its name? Some percentage of the stock here, he judged, had been manufactured in Occupied Japan. Half an hour earlier, across North Ocean Boulevard, he’d watched harshly tonsured child-soldiers, clad in skateboarding outfits still showing factory creases, ogling Chinese-made orc-killing blades, spiked and serrated like the jaws of extinct predators. The seller’s stand had been hung with Mardi Gras beads, Confederate-flag beach towels, unauthorized Harley-Davidson memorabilia. He’d wondered how many young men had enjoyed an afternoon in Myrtle Beach as a final treat, before heading ultimately for whatever theater of war, wind whipping sand along the Grand Strand and the boardwalk. In the amusement arcades, he judged, some of the machines were older than he was. And some of his own angels, not the better ones, spoke of an ancient and deeply impacted drug culture, ground down into the carnival grime of the place, interstitial and immortal; sun-damaged skin, tattoos unreadable, eyes that peered from faces suggestive

9 of gas-station taxidermy. He was meeting someone here. They were supposed to be alone. He himself wasn’t, really. Somewhere nearby, Oliver Sleight would be watching a Milgrim-cursor on a website, on the screen of his Neo phone, identical to Milgrim’s own. He’d given Milgrim the Neo on that first flight from Basel to Heathrow, stressing the necessity of keeping it with him at all times, and turned on, except when aboard commercial flights. He moved, now, away from the dog-headed angels, the shadow of the shark. Past articles of an ostensibly more natural history: starfish, sand dollars, sea horses, conchs. He climbed a short flight of broad stairs, from the boardwalk level, toward North Ocean Boulevard. Until he found himself, eye-to-navel, with the stomach of a young, very pregnant woman, her elastic-paneled jeans chemically distressed in ways that suggested baroquely improbable patterns of wear. The taut pink T-shirt revealed her protruding navel in a way he found alarmingly suggestive of a single giant breast. “You’d better be him,” she said, then bit her lower lip. Blond, a face he’d forget as soon as he looked away. Large dark eyes. “I’m meeting someone,” he said, careful to maintain eye contact, uncomfortably aware that he was actually addressing the navel, or nipple, directly in front of his mouth. Her eyes grew larger. “You aren’t foreign, are you?” “New York,” Milgrim admitted, assuming that might all too easily qualify. “I don’t want him getting in any trouble,” she said, at once softly and fiercely. “None of us does,” he instantly assured her. “No need. At all.” His attempted smile felt like something forced from a flexible squeezetoy. “And you are … ? “Seven or eight months,” she said, in awe at her own gravidity. “He’s not here. He didn’t like this, here.” “None of us does,” he said, then wondered if that was the right thing to say. “You got GPS?” “Yes,” said Milgrim. Actually, according to Sleight, their Neos had two kinds, American and Russian, the American being notoriously political, and prone to unreliability in the vicinity of sensitive sites. “He’ll be there in an hour,” she said, passing Milgrim a faintly damp slip of folded paper. “You better get started. And you better be alone.” Milgrim took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but if it means driving, I won’t be able to go alone. I don’t have a license. My friend will have to drive me. It’s a white Ford Taurus X.” She stared at him. Blinked. “Didn’t they just fuck Ford up, when they went to giving them f-names?” He swallowed. “My mother had a Freestyle. Transmission’s a total piece of shit. Get that

10 computer wet, car won’t move at all. Gotta disconnect it first. Brakes wore out about two weeks off the lot. They always made that squealing noise anyway.” But she seemed comforted, in this, as if by the recollection of something maternal, familiar. “Right as rain,” he said, surprising himself with an expression he might never have used before. He pocketed the slip of paper without looking at it. “Could you do something for me, please?” he asked her belly. “Could you call him, now, and let him know my friend will be driving?” Lower lip worked its way back under her front teeth. “My friend has the money,” Milgrim said. “No trouble.” >>>“And she called him?” asked Sleight, behind the wheel of the Taurus X, from the center of a goatee he occasionally trimmed with the aid of a size-adjustable guide, held between his teeth. “She indicated she would,” Milgrim said. “Indicated.” They were headed inland, toward the town of Conway, through a landscape that reminded Milgrim of driving somewhere near Los Angeles, to a destination you wouldn’t be particularly anxious to reach. This abundantly laned highway, lapped by the lots of outlet malls, a Home Depot the size of a cruise ship, theme restaurants. Though interstitial detritus still spoke stubbornly of maritime activity and the farming of tobacco. Fables from before the Anaheiming. Milgrim concentrated on these leftovers, finding them centering. A lot offering garden mulch. A four-store strip mall with two pawnshops. A fireworks emporium with its own batting cage. Loans on your auto title. Serried ranks of unpainted concrete garden statuary. “Was that a twelve-step program you were in, in Basel?” asked Sleight. “I don’t think so,” said Milgrim, assuming Sleight was referring to the number of times his blood had been changed. >>>“How close will those numbers put us to where he wants us?” Milgrim asked. Sleight, back in Myrtle Beach, had tapped coordinates from the pregnant girl’s note into his phone, which now rested on his lap. “Close enough,” Sleight said. “Looks like that’s it now, off to the right.” They were well through Conway, or in any case through the malled-over fringes of whatever Conway was. Buildings were thinning out, the landscape revealing more of the lineaments of an extinct agriculture. Sleight slowed, swung right, onto spread gravel, a crushed limestone, pale gray. “Money’s under your seat,” he said. They were rolling, with a smooth, even crunch of tires in gravel, toward a long, one-story, white-painted clapboard structure, overhung with a roof that lacked a porch beneath it. Rural roadside architecture of some previous day, plain but sturdy. Four smallish rectangular front windows had been modernized with

11 plate glass. Milgrim had the cardboard tube for the tracing paper upright between his thighs, two sticks of graphite wrapped in a Kleenex in the right side pocket of his chinos. There was half of a fresh five-foot sheet of foam-core illustration board in the back seat, in case he needed a flat surface to work on. Holding the bright red tube with his knees, he bent forward, fishing under the seat, and found a metallic-blue vinyl envelope with a molded integral zipper and three binder-holes. It contained enough bundled hundreds to give it the heft of a good-sized paperback dictionary. Gravel-crunch ceased as they halted, not quite in front of the building. Milgrim saw a primitive rectangular sign on two weather-grayed uprights, rain-stained and faded, unreadable except for FAMILY, in pale blue italic serif caps. There were no other vehicles in the irregularly shaped gravel lot. He opened the door, got out, stood, the red tube in his left hand. He considered, then uncapped it, drawing out the furled tracing paper. He propped the red tube against the passenger seat, picked up the money, and closed the door. A scroll of semitranslucent white paper was less threatening. Cars passed on the highway. He walked the fifteen feet to the sign, his shoes crunching loudly on the gravel. Above the blue italic FAMILY, he made out EDGE CITY in what little remained of a peeling red; below it, RESTAURANT. At the bottom, to the left, had once been painted, in black, the childlike silhouettes of three houses, though like the red, sun and rain had largely erased them. To the right, in a different blue than FAMILY, was painted what he took to be a semi-abstract representation of hills, possibly of lakes. He guessed that this place was on or near the town’s official outskirts, hence the name. Someone, within the silent, apparently closed building, rapped sharply, once, on plate glass, perhaps with a ring. Milgrim went obediently to the front door, the tracing paper upheld in one hand like a modest scepter, the vinyl envelope held against his side with the other. The door opened inward, revealing a football player with an Eighties porn haircut. Or someone built like one. A tall, long-legged young man with exceptionally powerful-looking shoulders. He stepped back, gesturing for Milgrim to enter. “Hello,” said Milgrim, stepping into warm unmoving air, mixed scents of industrial-strength disinfectant and years of cooking. “I have your money.” Indicating the plastic envelope. A place unused, though ready to be used. Mothballed, Edge City, like a B-52 in the desert. He saw the empty glass head of a gum machine, on its stand of wrinkle-finished brown pipe. “Put it on the counter,” the young man said. He wore pale blue jeans and a black T-shirt, both of which looked as though they might contain a percentage of Spandex, and heavy-looking black athletic shoes. Milgrim noted a narrow, rectangular, unusually positioned pocket, quite far down on the right side-seam. A stainless steel clip held some large folding knife firmly there. Milgrim did as he was told, noting the chrome and the turquoise leatherette of the

12 row of floor-mounted stools in front of the counter, which was topped with worn turquoise Formica. He partially unfurled the paper. “I’ll need to make tracings,” he explained. “It’s the best way to capture the detail. I’ll take photographs first.” “Who’s in the car?” “My friend.” “Why can’t you drive?” “DUI,” said Milgrim, and it was true, at least in some philosophical sense. Silently, the young man rounded an empty glass display-case that would once have contained cigarettes and candy. When he was opposite Milgrim, he reached beneath the counter and drew out something in a crumpled white plastic bag. He dropped this on the counter and swept the plastic envelope toward the far end, giving the impression that his body, highly trained, was doing these things of its own accord, while he himself continued to survey from some interior distance. Milgrim opened the bag and took out a pair of folded, unpressed trousers. They were the coppery beige shade he knew as coyote brown. Unfolding them, he lay them out flat along the Formica, took the camera from his jacket pocket, and began to photograph them, using the flash. He took six shots of the front, then turned them over and took six of the back. He took one photograph each of the four cargo pockets. He put the camera down, turned the pants inside out, and photographed them again. Pocketing the camera, he arranged them, still inside out, more neatly on the counter, spread the first of the four sheets of paper over them, and began, with one of the graphite sticks, to make his rubbing. He liked doing this. There was something inherently satisfying about it. He’d been sent to Hackney, to a tailor who did alterations, to spend an afternoon learning how to do it properly, and it pleased him, somehow, that this was a time-honored means of stealing information. It was like making a rubbing of a tombstone, or a bronze in a cathedral. The medium-hard graphite, if correctly applied, captured every detail of seam and stitching, all a sample-maker would need to reproduce the garment, as well as providing for reconstruction of the pattern. While he worked, the young man opened the envelope, unpacked the bundled hundreds, and silently counted them. “Needs a gusset,” he said as he finished. “Pardon?” Milgrim paused, the fingers of his right hand covered with graphite dust. “Gusset,” the young man said, reloading the blue envelope. “Inner thighs. They bind, if you’re rappelling.” “Thanks,” Milgrim said, showing graphite-smudged fingers. “Would you mind turning them over for me? I don’t want to get this on them.” >>>“Delta to Atlanta,” Sleight said, handing Milgrim a ticket envelope. He was back in the very annoying suit he’d forgone for Myrtle Beach, the one with the freakishly short trousers.

13 “Business?” “Coach,” said Sleight, his satisfaction entirely evident. He passed Milgrim a second envelope. “British Midland to Heathrow.” “Coach?” Sleight frowned. “Business.” Milgrim smiled. “He’ll want you in a meeting, straight off the plane.” Milgrim nodded. “Bye,” he said. He tucked the red tube beneath his arm and headed for check-in, his bag in his other hand, walking directly beneath a very large South Carolina state flag, oddly Islamic with its palm tree and crescent moon. 3. SLUT’S WOOL She woke to gray light around multiple layers of curtains and drapes. Lay staring up at a dim anamorphic view of the repeated insectoid cartouche, smaller and more distorted the closer to the ceiling. Shelves with objects, Wunderkammer stuff. Variously sized heads of marble, ivory, ormolu. The blank round bottom of the caged library. She checked her watch. Shortly after nine. She got out of bed, in her XXL Bollards T-shirt, put on the not-velour robe, and entered the bathroom, a tall deep cove of off-white tile. Turning on the enormous shower required as much effort as ever. A Victorian monster, its original taps were hulking knots of plated brass. Horizontal four-inch nickel-plate pipes caged you on three sides, handy for warming towels. Within these were slung sheets of inch-thick beveled glass, contemporary replacements. The original showerhead, mounted directly overhead, was thirty inches in diameter. Getting out of the robe and T-shirt, she put on a disposable cap, stepped in, and lathered up with Cabinet’s artisanal soap, smelling faintly of cucumber. She kept a picture of this shower on her iPhone. It reminded her of H. G. Wells’s time machine. It had probably been in use when he began the serial that would become his first novel. Toweling off, applying moisturizer, she listened to BBC through an ornate bronze grate. Nothing of catastrophic import since she’d last listened, though nothing particularly positive either. Early-twenty-first-century quotidian, death-spiral subtexts kept well down in the mix. She took off the shower cap and shook her head, hair retaining residual stylist’s mojo from the salon in Selfridges. She liked to eat lunch in Selfridges’ food hall, escaping through its back door before the communal trance of shopping put her under. Though that was all it was likely to do, in a department store. She was more vulnerable to smaller places, and in London that could be very dangerous. The Japanese jeans she was pulling on now, for instance. Fruit of a place around the corner from Inchmale’s studio, the week before. Zen emptiness, bowls with shards of pure solidified indigo, like blue-black glass. The handsome, older, Japanese shopkeeper, in her Waiting for Godot

14 outfit. You’ll have to watch that now, she advised herself. Money. Brushing her teeth, she noticed the vinyl Blue Ant figurine on the marble sinktop, amid her lotions and makeup. You let me down, she thought to the jaunty ant, its four arms akimbo. Aside from a few pieces of jewelry, it was one of the few things she owned that she’d had since she’d first known Hubertus Bigend. She’d tried abandoning it, at least once, but somehow it was still with her. She’d thought she’d left it in the penthouse he kept in Vancouver, but it had been in her bag when she’d arrived in New York. She’d come, however vaguely, to imagine it as a sort of inverse charm. A cartoon rendition of the trademark of his agency, she’d let it serve as a secret symbol of her unwillingness to have anything further to do with him. She’d trusted it to keep him away. She really hadn’t had that much other property to replace, she reminded herself, swishing mouthwash. The dot-com bubble and an ill-advised foray into retailing vinyl records had seen to that, well before he’d found her. She wasn’t quite that badly off now, but if she’d understood her accountant correctly she’d lost nearly fifty percent of her net worth when the market had gone down. And this time she hadn’t done anything to cause it. No start-up shares, no quixotic record store in Brooklyn. Everything she owned, currently, was here in this room. Aside from devalued money market shares, and some boxes of American author’s copies, back in the Tribeca Grand. She spat mouthwash into the marble sink. Inchmale didn’t mind Bigend, not the way she did, but Inchmale, as formidably bright as she knew him to be, was also gifted with a useful crudeness of mind, an inbuilt psychic callus. He found Bigend interesting. Possibly he found him creepy, too, though for Inchmale, interesting and creepy were broadly overlapping categories. He didn’t, she guessed, find Bigend that utter an anomaly. An overly wealthy, dangerously curious fiddler with the world’s hidden architectures. There was no way, she knew, to tell an entity like Bigend that you wanted nothing to do with him. That would simply bring you more firmly to his attention. She’d had her time in Bigend’s employ; while brief, it had been entirely too eventful. She’d put it behind her, and gone on with her book project, which had grown quite naturally out of what she’d been doing (or had thought she’d been doing) for Bigend. Although, she reminded herself, fastening her bra and pulling on a T-shirt, the money she’d seen reduced by almost half had come to her via Blue Ant. There was that. She pulled a sheer black mohair sweater over the T-shirt, smoothed it over her hips, and pushed up the sleeves. She sat on the edge of the bed, to put on her shoes. Then back into the bathroom for makeup. Purse, iPhone, key with its tassel. Out, then, and past the identical follies in their different landscapes. To press the button and wait for the lift. She put her face close to the iron cage, to see the lift rise toward her, atop it some complex electromechanical Tesla-node no designer had even had to fake up, the real deal, whatever function it might serve. And decked, she always

15 noted with a certain satisfaction, with a bit of frank slut’s wool, the only actual dust she’d yet seen in Cabinet. Even a few errant cigarette butts, the English being beasts that way. And down, to the floor above the paneled foyer, where the night’s boozing and networking had left no evidence, and the serving staff, reassuringly immune to the long room’s decor, were about their morning business. She made her way to the rear, taking a seat at a place for two, beneath what might originally have been a gun rack in parquetry, but which now held half a dozen narwhale tusks. The Italian girl brought her a pot of coffee, unbidden, with a smaller one of steamed milk, and the Times. She was starting her second cup, Times unread, when she saw Hubertus Bigend mount the stairhead, down the full length of the long room, wrapped in a wide, putty-colored trench coat. He was the ultimate in velour-robe types, and might just as well have been wearing one now as he swept toward her through the drawing room, unknotting the coat’s belt as he came, pawing back its Crimean lapels, and revealing the only International Klein Blue suit she’d ever seen. He somehow managed always to give her the impression, seeing him again, that he’d grown visibly larger, though without gaining any particular weight. Simply bigger. Perhaps, she thought, as if he grew somehow closer. As he did now, breakfasting Cabineteers cringing as he passed, less in fear of his vast trailing coat and its dangerously swinging belt than out of awareness that he didn’t see them. “Hollis,” he said. “You look magnificent.” She rose, to be air-kissed. Up close, he always seemed too full of blood, by several extra quarts at least. Rosy as a pig. Warmer than a normal person. Scented with some ancient European barber-splash. “Hardly,” she said. “Look at you. Look at your suit.” “Mr. Fish,” he said, shrugging out of the trench coat with a rattle of grenade-loops and lanyard-anchors. His shirt was palest gold, the silk tie knit in an almost matching shade. “He’s very good,” she said. “He’s not dead,” said Bigend, smiling, settling himself in the armchair opposite. “Dead?” She took her seat. “Apparently not. Just impossible to find. I found his cutter,” he said. “In Savile Row.” “That’s Klein Blue, isn’t it?” “Of course.” “It looks radioactive. In a suit.” “It unsettles people,” he said. “I hope you didn’t wear it for me.” “Not at all.” He smiled. “I wore it because I enjoy it.”

16 “Coffee?” “Black.” She signaled to the Italian girl. “How was the black metal?” “Tremolo picking,” he said, perhaps slightly fretfully. “Double-kick drumming. Reg thinks something’s there.” He tilted his head slightly. “Do you?” “I don’t keep up.” Adding milk to her coffee. The Italian girl returned for their breakfast order. Hollis asked for oatmeal with fruit, Bigend for the full English. “I loved your book,” he said. “I thought the reception was quite gratifying. Particularly the piece in Vogue.” “ ‘Old rock singer publishes book of pictures’?” “No, really. It was very good.” He tidied the trench coat, which he’d draped across the arm of his chair. “Working on something else now?” She sipped her coffee. “You want to follow that up,” he said. “I hadn’t noticed.” “Barring scandal,” he said, “society is reluctant to let someone who’s become famous for one thing become famous for another.” “I’m not trying to become famous.” “You already are.” “Was. Briefly. And in quite a small way.” “A degree of undeniable celebrity,” he said, like a doctor offering a particularly obvious diagnosis. They sat silently, then, Hollis pretending to glance over the first few pages of the Times, until the Italian girl and an equally pretty and dark-haired boy arrived, bearing breakfast on dark wooden trays with brass handles. They arranged these on the low coffee table and retreated, Bigend studying the sway of the girl’s hips. “I adore the full English,” he said. “The offal. Blood pudding. The beans. The bacon. Were you here before they invented food?” he asked. “You must have been.” “I was,” she admitted. “I was very young.” “Even then,” he said, “the full English was a thing of genius.” He was slicing a sausage that looked like haggis, but boiled in the stomach of a small animal, something on the order of a koala. “There’s something you could help us out with,” he said, and put a slice of sausage in his mouth. “Us.” He chewed, nodded, swallowed. “We aren’t just an advertising agency. I’m sure you know that. We do brand vision transmission, trend forecasting, vendor management,

17 youth market recon, strategic planning in general.” “Why didn’t that commercial ever come out, the one they paid us all the money to use ‘Hard to Be One’ in?” He dabbed a torn toast-finger into the runny yellow eye of a fried egg, bit off half of it, chewed, swallowed, wiped his lips with his napkin. “Do you care?” “That was a lot of money.” “That was China,” he said. “The vehicle the ad was for hasn’t made it to roll-out. Won’t.” “Why not?” “There were problems with the design. Fundamental ones. Their government decided that that wasn’t the vehicle with which China should enter the world market. Particularly not in the light of the various tainted food product scandals. And whatnot.” “Was it that bad?” “Fully.” He forked baked beans adroitly onto toast. “They didn’t need your song, in the end,” he said, “and, as far we know, the executives in charge of the project are all still very much alive. Quite an optimal outcome for all concerned.” He started on his bacon. She ate her oatmeal and fruit, watching him. He ate quickly, methodically topping up whatever metabolism kept him firing on those extra cylinders. She’d never seen him tired, or jet-lagged. He seemed to exist in his own personal time zone. He finished before she did, wiping the white plate clean with a final half-triangle of golden Cabinet toast. “Brand vision transmission,” he said. “Yes?” She raised an eyebrow. “Narrative. Consumers don’t buy products, so much as narratives.” “That’s old,” she said. “It must be, because I’ve heard it before.” She took a sip of cooled coffee. “To some extent, an idea like that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Designers are taught to invent characters, with narratives, who they then design products for, or around. Standard procedure. There are similar procedures in branding generally, in the invention of new products, new companies, of all kinds.” “So it works?” “Oh, it works,” he said, “but because it does, it’s become de facto. Once you have a way in which things are done, the edge migrates. Goes elsewhere.” “Where?” “That’s where you come in,” he said. “I do not.” He smiled. He had, as ever, a great many very white teeth.

18 “You have bacon in your teeth,” she said, though he didn’t. Covering his mouth with the white linen napkin, he tried to find the nonexistent bacon shard. Lowering it, he grimaced widely. She pretended to peer. “I think you got it,” she said, doubtfully. “And I’m not interested in your proposition.” “You’re a bohemian,” he said, folding the napkin and putting it on the tray, beside his plate. “What does that mean?” “You’ve scarcely ever held a salaried position. You’re freelance. Have always been freelance. You’ve accumulated no real property.” “Not entirely through want of trying.” “No,” he said, “but when you do try, your heart’s scarcely in it. I’m a bohemian myself.” “Hubertus, you’re easily the richest person I’ve ever met.” This was, she knew as she said it, not literally true, but anyone she’d met who might have been wealthier than Bigend had tended to be comparatively dull. He was easily the most problematic rich person she’d yet encountered. “It’s a by-product,” he said, carefully. “And one of the things it’s a by-product of is my fundamental disinterest in wealth.” And, really, she knew that she believed him, at least about that. It was true, and it did things to his capacity for risk-taking. It was what made him, she knew from experience, so peculiarly dangerous to be around. “My mother was a bohemian,” he said. “Phaedra,” she remembered, somehow. “I made her old age as comfortable as possible. That isn’t always the case, with bohemians.” “That was good of you.” “Reg is quite the model of the successful bohemian, isn’t he?” “I suppose he is.” “He’s always working on something, Reg. Always. Always something new.” He looked at her, across the heavy silver pots. “Are you?” And he had her, then, she knew. Looking somehow straight into her. “No,” she said, there being nothing else really to say. “You should be,” he said. “The secret, of course, is that it doesn’t really matter what it is. Whatever you do, because you are an artist, will bring you to the next thing of your own. That’s what happened the last time, isn’t it? You wrote your book.” “But you were lying to me,” she said. “You pretended you had a magazine, and that I was writing for it.”

19 “I did, potentially, have a magazine. I had staff.” “One person!” “Two,” he said, “counting you.” “I can’t work that way,” she told him. “I won’t.” “It won’t be that way. This is entirely less … speculative.” “Wasn’t the NSA or someone tapping your phone, reading your e-mail?” “But now we know that they were doing that to everyone.” He loosened his pale golden tie. “We didn’t, then.” “You did,” she said. “You’d guessed. Or found out.” “Someone,” he said, “is developing what may prove to be a somewhat new way to transmit brand vision.” “You sound guarded in your appreciation.” “A certain genuinely provocative use of negative space,” he said, sounding still less pleased. “Who?” “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been able to find out. I feel that someone has read and understood my playbook. And may possibly be extending it.” “Then send Pamela,” she said. “She understands all that. Or someone else. You have a small army of people who understand all that. You must.” “But that’s exactly it. Because they ‘understand all that,’ they won’t find the edge. They won’t find the new. And worse, they’ll trample on it, inadvertently crush it, beneath a certain mediocrity inherent in professional competence.” He dabbed his lips with the folded napkin, though they didn’t seem to need it. “I need a wild card. I need you.” He sat back, then, and regarded her in exactly the way he’d regarded the tidy and receding ass of the Italian girl, though in this case, she knew, it had nothing at all to do with sex. “Dear God,” she said, entirely without expecting to, and simultaneously wishing she were very small. Small enough to curl up in the slut’s wool that crowned the steampunk lift, between those few cork-colored filter tips. “Does ‘The Gabriel Hounds’ mean anything to you?” he asked. “No,” she said. He smiled, obviously pleased.

20 4. PARADOXICAL ANTAGONIST With the red cardboard tube tucked carefully in beside him, under the thin British Midlands blanket, Milgrim lay awake in the darkened cabin of his flight to Heathrow. He’d taken his pills about fifteen minutes earlier, after some calculations on the back cover of the in-flight magazine. Time-zone transitions could be tricky, in terms of dosing schedules, particularly when you weren’t allowed to know exactly what it was you were taking. Whatever the doctors in Basel provided, he never saw it in its original factory form, so had no way of figuring out what it might be. This was intentional, they had explained to him, and necessary to his treatment. Everything was repackaged, in variously sized featureless white gelatin capsules, which he was forbidden to open. He’d pushed the empty white bubble-pack, with its tiny, precisely handwritten notations of date and hour, in purple ink, far down into the seatback pocket. It would remain on the plane, at Heathrow. Nothing to be carried through customs. His passport lay against his chest, beneath his shirt, in a Faraday pouch protecting the information on its resident RFID tag. RFID snooping was an obsession of Sleight’s. Radio-frequency identification tags. They were in lots of things, evidently, and definitely in every recent U.S. passport. Sleight himself was quite fond of RFID snooping, which Milgrim supposed was one reason he worried about it. You could sit in a hotel lobby and remotely collect information from the passports of American businessmen. The Faraday pouch, which blocked all radio signals, made this impossible. Milgrim’s Neo phone was another example of Sleight’s obsession with security or, as Milgrim supposed, control. It had an almost unimaginably tiny on-screen keyboard, one that could only be operated with a stylus. Milgrim’s hand-eye coordination was quite good, according to the clinic, but he still had to concentrate like a jeweler when he needed to send a message. More annoyingly, Sleight had set it to lock its screen after thirty seconds of idle, requiring Milgrim to enter his password if he stopped to think for longer than twenty-nine seconds. When he’d complained about this, Sleight explained that it gave potential attackers only a thirty-second window to get in and read the phone, and that admin privileges were in any case out of the question. The Neo, Milgrim gathered, was less a phone than a sort of tabula rasa, one which Sleight could field-update, without Milgrim’s knowledge or consent, installing or deleting applications as he saw fit. It was also prone to something Sleight called “kernel panic,” which caused it to freeze and need to be restarted, a condition Milgrim himself had been instantly inclined to identify with. Lately, though, Milgrim didn’t panic quite as easily. When he did, he seemed to restart of his own accord. It was, his cognitive therapist at the clinic had explained, a by-product of doing other things, rather than something one could train oneself to do in and of itself. Milgrim preferred to regard that by-product obliquely, in brief sidelong glances, else it somehow stop being produced. The biggest thing he was doing, in terms of the by-product of reduced anxiety, the therapist had explained, was to no longer take benzos on as constant a basis as possible. He no longer took them at all, apparently, having undergone a very gradual

21 withdrawal at the clinic. He wasn’t sure when he’d actually stopped having any, as the unmarked capsules had made it impossible to know. And he’d taken lots of capsules, many of them containing food supplements of various kinds, the clinic having some obscure naturopathic basis which he’d put down to basic Swissness. Though in other ways the treatment had been quite aggressive, involving everything from repeated massive blood transfusions to the use of a substance they called a “paradoxical antagonist.” This latter produced exceptionally peculiar dreams, in which Milgrim was stalked by an actual Paradoxical Antagonist, a shadowy figure he somehow associated with the colors in 1950s American advertising illustrations. Perky. He missed his cognitive therapist. He’d been delighted to be able to speak Russian with such a beautifully educated woman. Somehow he couldn’t imagine having transacted all of that in English. He’d stayed eight months, in the clinic, longer than any of the other clients. All of whom, when opportunity had afforded, had quietly asked the name of his firm. Milgrim had replied variously, at first, though always naming some iconic brand from his youth: Coca-Cola, General Motors, Kodak. Their eyes had widened, hearing this. Toward the end of this stay, he’d switched to Enron. Their eyes had narrowed. This had partly been the result of his therapist’s having ordered him to use the internet to familiarize himself with the events of the previous decade. He had, as she’d quite rightly pointed out, missed all of that. >>>He dreams this in the tall white room, its floor of limed oak. Tall windows. Beyond them, snow is falling. The world outside is utterly quiet, depthless. The light is without direction. “Where did you learn your Russian, Mr. Milgrim?” “Columbia. The university.” Her white face. Black hair matte, center-parted, drawn back tight. “You described your previous situation as one of literal captivity. This was after Columbia?” “Yes.” “How do you see your current situation as differing from that?” “Do I see it as captivity?” “Yes.” “Not in the same way.” “Do you understand why they would be willing to pay the very considerable fees required to keep you here?” “No. Do you?” “Not at all. Do you understand the nature of doctor-patient confidentiality, in my profession?”

22 “You aren’t supposed to tell anyone what I tell you?” “Exactly. Do you imagine I would?” “I don’t know.” “I would not. When I agreed to come here, to work with you, I made that absolutely clear. I am here for you, Mr. Milgrim. I am not here for them.” “That’s good.” “But because I am here for you, Mr. Milgrim, I am also concerned for you. It is as though you are being born. Do you understand?” “No.” “You were incomplete when they brought you here. You are somewhat less incomplete now, but your recovery is necessarily a complexly organic process. If you are very fortunate, it will continue for the rest of your life. ‘Recovery’ is perhaps a deceptive word for this. You are recovering some aspects of yourself, certainly, but the more important things are things you’ve never previously possessed. Primary aspects of development. You have been stunted, in certain ways. Now you have been given an opportunity to grow.” “But that’s good, isn’t it?” “Good, yes. Comfortable? Not always.” >>>At Heathrow there was a tall black man, head immaculately shaven, holding a clipboard against his chest. On it, in medium-nib red Sharpie, someone had written “mILgRIm.” “Milgrim,” Milgrim said. “Urine test,” the man said. “This way.” Refusing to submit to random testing would have been a deal-breaker. They’d been very clear about that, from the start. He would have minded it less if they’d managed to collect the samples at less awkward times, but he supposed that was the point. The man removed Milgrim’s red name from his clipboard as he led him into an obviously preselected public restroom, crumpling it and thrusting it into his black overcoat. “This way,” walking briskly down a row of those seriously private British toilet-caves. Not cubicles, or stalls, but actual narrow little closets, with real doors. This was usually the first cultural difference Milgrim noticed here. Englishmen must experience American public toilets as remarkably semicommunal, he guessed. The man gestured him into a vacant toilet-room, glanced back the way they’d come, then quickly stepped in, closing the door behind him, locked it, and handed Milgrim a plastic sandwich bag containing a blue-topped sample bottle. Milgrim propped the red cardboard tube, carefully, in a corner.

23 They had to watch, Milgrim knew. Otherwise, you might switch containers, palm off someone else’s clean urine. Or even use, he’d read in New York tabloids, a special prosthetic penis. Milgrim removed the bottle from the bag, tore off the paper seal, removed the blue lid, and filled it, the phrase “without further ceremony” coming to mind. He capped it, placed it in the bag, and passed it over, in such a way that the man wouldn’t have to experience the warmth of his fresh urine. He’d gotten quite good at this. The man dropped it into a small brown paper bag, which he folded and stuffed into his coat pocket. Milgrim turned and finished urinating, as the man unlocked the door and stepped out. When Milgrim emerged, the man was washing his hands, fluorescent lights reflecting off the impressive dome of his skull. “How’s the weather?” Milgrim asked, soaping his own hands from a touch-free dispenser, the cardboard tube resting on the water-flecked faux-granite counter. “Raining,” said the man, drying his hands. When Milgrim had washed and dried his own hands, he used the damp paper towels to wipe the bottom plastic cap of his tube. “Where are we going?” “Soho,” the man said. Milgrim followed him out, his overnight bag slung over one shoulder, the tube tucked under the opposite arm. Then he remembered the Neo. When he turned it on, it began to ring. 5. THIN ON THE GROUND And when she’d watched him, from her chair, the collar of his coat popped like a vampire’s cape, finally descend the stairs to Cabinet’s foyer, dropping further out of sight with each step, she put her head back against slippery brocade and gazed at the spiraled lances of the narwhale tusks, in their ornate rack. Then she sat up and asked for a white coffee, a cup rather than a pot. The breakfast crowd had mostly gone, leaving only Hollis and a pair of darkly suited Russian men who looked like extras from that Cronenberg film. She got out her iPhone and Googled “Gabriel Hounds.” By the time her coffee arrived, she’d determined that The Gabriel Hounds was the title of a novel by Mary Stewart, had been the title of at least one CD, and had been or was the name of at least one band. Everything, she knew, had already been the title of a CD, just as everything had already been the name of a band. This was why bands, for the past twenty years or so, had mostly had such unmemorable names, almost as though they’d come to pride themselves on it.

24 But the original Gabriel Hounds, it appeared, were folklore, legend. Dogs heard coursing, however faintly, high up in the windy night. Cousins it seemed to the Wild Hunt. This was Inchmale territory, definitely, and there were even weirder variants. Some involving hounds with human heads, or hounds with the heads of human infants. This had to do with the belief that the Gabriel Hounds were hunting the souls of children who’d died unbaptized. Christian tacked over pagan, she guessed. And the hounds seemed to have originally been “ratchets,” an old word for dogs that hunt by scent. Gabriel Ratchets. Sometimes “gabble ratchets.” Inchmaleian totally. He’d name the right band the Gabble Ratchets instantly. “Left for you, Miss Henry.” The Italian girl, holding out a glossy paper carrier bag, yellow, unmarked. “Thank you.” Hollis put the iPhone down and accepted the bag. It had been stapled shut, she saw, and she envisioned the oversized brass stapler atop the pornographic desk, its business end the head of a turbaned Turk. A pair of identical business cards, multiply stapled, held the two handles together. PAMELA MAINWARING, BLUE ANT. She pulled off the cards and tugged the bag open, staples tearing through the glossy paper. A very heavy denim shirt. She took it out and spread it across her lap. No, a jacket. The denim darker than the thighs of her Japanese jeans, bordering on black. And it smelled of that indigo, strongly, an earthy jungle scent familiar from the shop where she’d found her jeans. The metal buttons, the rivet kind, were dead black, nonreflective, oddly powdery-looking. No exterior signage. The label, inside, below the back of the collar, was undyed leather, thick as most belts. On it had been branded not a name but the vague and vaguely disturbing outline of what she took to be a baby-headed dog. The branding iron appeared to have been twisted from a single length of fine wire, then heated, pressed down unevenly into the leather, which was singed in places. Centered directly beneath this, sewn under the bottom edge of the leather patch, was a small folded tab of white woven ribbon, machine-embroidered with three crisp, round black dots, arranged in a triangle. Indicating size? Her gaze was drawn back to the brand of the hound, with its almost featureless kewpie head. >>>“Twenty-ounce,” the handsomely graying professor of denim pronounced, the Gabriel Hounds jacket spread before her on a foot-thick slab of polished hardwood, atop what Hollis guessed had been the cast-iron legs of a factory lathe. “Slubby.” “Slubby?” Running her hand lightly over the jacket’s sleeve. “This roughness. In the weave.” “Is this Japanese denim?” The woman raised her eyebrows. She was dressed, today, in a tweed that looked

25 as if the brambles had been left in, khaki laundered so often as to be of no particular color, oxford cloth so coarse it seemed handloomed, and at least two tattered paisley cravats of peculiar but differing widths. “Americans forget how to make denim like this. Maybe loomed in Japan. Maybe not. Where did you find it?” “It belongs to a friend.” “You like it?” “I haven’t tried it on.” “No?” The woman moved behind Hollis, helping her remove her coat. She picked up the jacket and helped Hollis into it. Hollis saw herself in the mirror. Straightened. Smiled. “That’s not bad,” she said. She turned up the collar. “I haven’t worn one of these for at least twenty years.” “Fit is very good,” the woman said. She touched Hollis’s back with both hands, just below her shoulders. “By-swing shoulders. Inside, elastic ribbons, pull it into shape. This detail is from HD Lee mechanic jacket, early Fifties.” “If the fabric is Japanese, would it have to have been made in Japan?” “Possible. Build-quality, detailing, are best, but … Japan? Tunisia? Even California.” “You don’t know where I could find another like it? Or more of this brand?” She didn’t, somehow, want to name it. Their eyes met, in the mirror. “You know ‘secret brand’? You understand?” “I think so,” she said, doubtfully. “This is very secret brand,” the woman said. “I cannot help you.” “But you have,” Hollis said, “thank you,” suddenly wanting to be out of the beautifully spare little shop, the musky pong of indigo, “thank you very much.” She pulled her coat on, over the Gabriel Hounds jacket. “Thank you. Goodbye.” Outside, in Upper James Street, a boy was hurrying past, a hemisphere of thin black wool pulled down level with his eyes. All black, save for his white, blotchily unshaven face and the pavement-smudged white sole-edges of his black shoes. “Clammy,” she said, reflexively, as he passed her. “Fucking hell,” hissed Clammy, in his recently and somewhat oddly acquired West Hollywood American, and shuddered, as if from some sudden massive release of coiled tension. “What are you doing here?” “Looking for denim,” she said, then had to point back at the shop, having no idea what it was called, discovering simultaneously that it apparently had no sign. “Gabriel Hounds. They don’t have any.” Clammy’s eyebrows might have gone up, beneath his black beanie. “Like this,” she said, tugging at the unbuttoned denim jacket beneath her coat. His eyes narrowed. “Where’d you get that?”